Up in Smoke

We didn’t burn any literal figures of Judas on Saturday night, but we did burn a lot of bureaucracy.

My friend Juliana’s father recently passed away. It was very sudden. He was only 60 and it caught everyone by surprise. She’s now dealing with a mountain of legalities trying to sort out his estate. In emptying out his house, she collected 6 huge trash bags of paperwork dating back to the 1980’s. He had worked as a civil servant for the ferroviária and a lot of the papers had his CPF (social security #) and other personal information so in the absence of a paper shredder and in presence of a cool fall night and plenty of red wine we decided to make a bonfire.

It was good for her I think. People are buried very quickly in Brazil, usually within 24 hours and while Catholics hold a mass for the deceased 7 days later that tends to be as significant or even more so than the actual burial, there really does seem to be an absence of mourning rituals that help ease the transition for the family. We were up in the village when we got news in the morning that he had died the night before and that the funeral was being held that afternoon. We didn’t have time to get back for it. I asked if there was somewhere I could send flowers and the response was a bit confused. Flowers? For what exactly? They don’t do that here. Then we went to pay a visit to his house and I asked C’s aunt if there was any particular etiquette I didn’t know about - like do people bring a dish of food for the family? No, she said, we don’t do that here. It felt kind of strange not being able to do anything except offer words of condolence. But I guess death is like that. You can’t do anything. We are all completely helpless to the essential fact that every birth is eventually followed by death.

Burning up years of bureaucratic accumulation I think was a good cathartic exercise. And I felt happy to have at least something practical I could offer her by in the way of help. We tore open bag after bag and sent the papers fluttering into fire. It took us until well after 3am to get through all the bags.

Max decided to get in on the act and pulled out a box of papers that had been accumulating in his house for decades. He owned a video store back in the late 80’s and early 90’s and most of his papers were in relation to the store. For some comic relief, C started reading through some of the receipts for the store’s purchases and it sent us howling in laughter. Check it out:



Yes, it really truly is a receipt for $18,000,000 cruzeiros. Eighteen Million. The purchase of Imperdoáveis (Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven) alone cost $5,600,000 cruzeiros. And that's over 2 million for Pinocchio! This receipt is from 1993, right before the cruzeiro was flipped into it’s 3rd incarnation, the cruzeiro real – which would be the 4th currency in 7 years. The currency changes didn’t do anything to stem the rampant inflation that was increasing at a rate of 30% a month. They just kept changing the name and knocking off zeros so that the calculators could handle it. Bus fare alone cost 16,000 cruzeiros!

In looking around for details I read that at the time the currency was considered such a joke the central bank had a hard time to find mascots to print on it. No one wanted to be associated with it – the family of author Guimaraes Rosa (considered the Brazilian James Joyce) turned the central bank down when asked for permission to reprint his image. On the 5,000 bill they ended up putting a traditional looking character of a gaucho (a cowboy from the south of Brazil) on it framed by what were supposed to be mate leaves – although botanists protested that they were so badly drawn that they looked like weeds.


I also remember seeing in a exhibit at the New Museum in New York of Brazilian artists, one (I wish I could remember his name) painted on cruzeiros because they were worth less than the paper he would have otherwise purchased.

The cruzeiro lasted until 1994 when they finally got things under control with the current currency, the real. After scrounging around for some estimate on the exchange rate at the time – which was hard to pinpoint, with the inflation rising so rapidly on a daily basis – I did the calculations on Max’s movie purchases. In US dollars, that 5 million cruzeiro movie would have been around $70 USD.

We saved that receipt from the fire. If for nothing else then just to remember that crisis or not, things are relatively pretty darn good. But the rest we burned. Some things truly are better left in the past.

Illustrious Encounters

Well I’m home again, after two weeks back in the United States. The wedding was a truly wonderful experience. My friends rented a summer camp in the Catskills and most everyone stay overnight a couple of days and turned their nuptials into a three-day drunken party of bonfires and middle of the night antics, lake swimming (jumping off this inflatable raft called a blob at 3am) and barbecue, talent shows, square dancing and beyond. It’s so great to see your friends realize so perfectly their vision of their wedding. And it’s so great to have a lot of fun and get to talk to amazing and inspiring people and do it while seeing two people you love get married.

I didn’t have my camera with me but lots of other people took pictures, so I’m hoping they’ll put them up here. The pictures that are already posted there were done by the official photographer. Cool 70’s grainy look to them. My buddy Dz, looks so beautiful, and her beau is one handsome guy. I don’t think I make an appearance in any pics which is fine because I've pretty much been having a 3 year bad hair day.

While there I had very adolescent summer camp experience of being a despised ex-girlfriend. But not by the ex-boyfriend. We get on splendidly. But rather by the friend of another ex-girlfriend of same said ex-boyfriend. Confused? Yeah, that’s okay.

It’s interesting to find out that there exist narratives about your past still circulating amongst people you don’t even know. And then one day you encounter it in the form of “oh…. (coolly, you are looked up and down) so you’re the one who used to date ------.” (silence, clouds of judgment begin to darken the sky). A few nods and you awkwardly scuttle out to the side, racking your brain for what just occurred and wondering just exactly what on earth you did, or has been said about you. Hmmm… I hope it was very sordid and colorful because my life, in comparison to all those rock-star peers I hung out that weekend, could use a little salt and pepper fictionalizing.

As I mentioned, C did not come with me. We just couldn’t swing the cost of two plane tickets and we’ve felt some financial crunch in recent months (special thanks goes to our mayor.) He was lonely and sad to be away from all his old friends. Some of these people he’s known longer than I.

But in deciding to stay home and let me go, he was afforded an amazing opportunity that he would have otherwise missed. He got to work with one very illustrious musician in his studio.


If you don’t already know who this is, you should definitely get acquainted. Especially if your knowledge of Brazilian music begins with some heavy handed samba and ends with drowsy bossa nova. Milton Nascimento is by all accounts the most important name in Brazilian music in the last 40 years. According to C, his voice is still flawless and he said that listening to Milton on headphones as he sung live gave him goosebumps and confirmed that the universe is, despite all recent news to the contrary, still operating in perfect, harmonic order.

Here is one of his tracks from the iconic record Clube da Esquina made by a collective of musicians in the early 70’s.

arrivals and departures

So this never got posted. I’ve been traveling the past two weeks and I thought I would have so much down time I would catch up on old posts that I’ve been meaning to get up, but it seems that free-wifi has gone the way of the dinosaurs – or maybe it was just a fable that I forgot never existed anyway. So, here’s what I thought about posting two weeks ago when I arrived, and I am now posting as I leave the US (Tampa, nice old Florida airport, kindly still offers free wifi…) So sorry for the backwards posting….


Sept. 4th:

Well, I’m on my way to New York for a week to go to my dear friend’s wedding. I have a couple of blogs that I’ve been meaning to post but got behind on. Hopefully I’ll have a little time to catch up now. It’s been a year and a half since I last visited the United States – as I write this I’m sitting in Washington Dulles waiting for a connecting flight. The flight from Rio to Washington was 10 hours. I don’t remember it being so long in the past. I’m wondering if its like a car and flying slower saves on fuel.

There is a strange transformation that happens on the overnight flights from Brazil. This slide from Portuguese to English. You go through check-in, security, boarding, the shuffling of bags in the overheads and the negotiations for the armrest in Portuguese. The staff start out conversing mostly in Portuguese and somewhere around the time when the dinner service comes through you suddenly have a choice of frango or chicken. Then the movie starts, and you have a choice of Portuguese or English versions and then you drift in and out of sleep dreaming some in both language, hearing pieces of conversations in both, and at some point during the night everyone on the flight slowly slides into English and you tumble out of the plane and into the airport at 6am, blinking like a bug eyed marsupial in the bright fluorescents and the immigration officials are shouting orders in English (some of it heavily accented) and your fellow Brazilian travelers are suddenly quieted and they turn to one another for reassurance and confirmation that they are doing the right thing.

The smatterings of Portuguese conversations continue through baggage claim and customs and you might once or twice get confused and ask for where the nearest Starbucks is in Portuguese. But upon finding it, you know you are home and you excitedly start speaking English to who ever will listen to you, slurping on your grown-up sippy cup and telling them that you forgot how strong Starbucks is and sort of burnt tasting too. And you are suddenly struck by how nice everyone is. American niceness. English speaking niceness. Brazilians are nice too, but it’s different. Tottering down the concourse, someone suddenly changes direction in front of you and you bump into each other and he actually apologizes. This catches you so off guard that blubber, no, no it’s okay and you feel like hugging him, and you are so happy to be home that when the gate agent says “Hi how are you today” you feel like hugging her too, the gate agent.

But then you get on your flight to LaGuardia and the people behind you are speaking Polish or Russian (you never could tell them apart) and someone else is speaking Spanish and the flight attendants have accents and when you get there your cab driver will probably be Pakistani (which of course is a stereotype, but it will probably be true) but it’s unlikely that you will get a cab because you are still a cheapskate so you’ll get on the Q33 bus and catch the F train and it will be the same dirty orange bucket seat train that you were taking 15 years ago and there will be the same faces, the jaded hipster girl, the geeky writer guy in wrinkled khakis, and the balding Indian guy, probably a tech worker here on an H-1B visa, and the art school kid in skinny jeans reading Jules Verne, and the Puerto Rican kid in an askew Yankee’s cap and the bucktooth Chinese woman who smells like salted fish and every other possible ethnicity or combination of ethnicities it will all come back to you and you will realize you are back not just in the United States, but unquestionably home in New York, and you will love it and hate it in equal measure just like always.

Country Fool

This is a Brazilian bonfire, called a fogueira. It’s a part of the traditional winter parties here that go by various names but are all related with some saint’s days in the month of June.

Sometimes it’s called the country festival because that’s the theme connecting them all no matter what the name. People (mostly kids, and rarely adults as you will see) dress up in clothes that look very Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher – boys in cut-off jeans, checked shirts, straw hats and a painted mustache, girls in country dresses with their hair in braids (called Maria Chiquita’s) and freckles painted on their cheeks. There is square dancing (quadrilha) to country music (forró), bonfires and traditional country food such as canjiquinha (a corn stew) and paçoca (exactly like a reese peanut buttercup, sans chocolate).

Sometimes it’s called the Winter Carnival, especially in the north of the country where, as usual, any excuse will do to make a big party, they go all out and have big parades and street parties that go on for days.

Usually it’s called Festa Junina, or June festival, because the month has several saints days (Santo Antonio, but especially São João) for which the parties were originally celebrated. Although now it is celebrated anytime between June and August.

(On a side note: Living in Brazil I’ve learned to be flexible about pining down names or dates or specificity to a lot of things. One person’s raspberry is another’s mulberry is another’s wild strawberry. It took us months to figure out the translations of vegetables in the supermarket only to be completely confused again when local farmers near our land call them something else, and then to find out when we started our organic delivery they had yet other names. We still don’t know if acelga is 1) chard, 2) escarole or 3) chicory! Oktoberfest is celebrated in September (at least in my city) and there seem to be more Festa Junina parties in July than June. So I’ve found its best be fluid and not get too hung up on things. But I digress… )

So some friends we’ve made since moving here invited us to a Festa Junina last week. They are a very nice couple, ½ American, ½ Brazilian, like us. He’s a retired pharmaceutical executive and she’s an artist – a thoroughly kooky and fun painter. They have an adult son who lives in the US who was here visiting and it was his birthday. So our wild artist buddy called and in the conversation with C she insisted that it would be traditional and that we should dress up. I pestered C several times about this. “Are you sure she said people would be dressing up? People really do this?” To which he answered yes, yes and yes. (He however withheld the fact that during the conversation she let slip she was a couple of glasses flush with wine – this he revealed as we were nearly arriving at the party.)

So I dug through my closet and found a great vintage Betsy Johnson red and white check dress – country chic—and a pair of cowboy boots. I braided my hair and tied it up with ribbons, painted pink on my cheeks and dotted them with freckles. C didn’t go too far out. He put on a checked flannel shirt a pair of jeans and I painted a mustache on him with eyeliner. And off we went to the party.

And OF COURSE, it was one of those awful scenes from a movie where the girl shows up and is THE ONLY ONE IN COSTUME. (There are several movies with scenes like that aren’t there? It always seems to be a bunny costume too. At least I wasn’t in a bunny costume…)

I was fuming. Our kooky host started out in a sort-of modified, artsy country girl costume, but by the end of the night she had somehow transformed herself French, complete with a red beret and scarf…

Another thing I have learned about Brazilians is that they don’t like to appear foolish. They will party like there is no tomorrow, but are always in control of the situation and their appearance. Especially Brazilian women, the majority of which appear to spend a full third of their waking hours caring for their appearance between exercise, makeup, clothing, shoes, hair, facials, anti-cellulite massage, lymphatic drainage, botox, plastic surgery, waxing, lazering, schluffing and buffing every part of their perpetually tanned long and lean limbs -- and they are beautiful, if not (in my opinion) a bit, overdone. But maybe I’m just jealous.

Anyway, I got a few raised eyebrows by some of the younger set – with their painted on jeans, and sleekly blown out hair. I managed to scrub the freckles off my cheeks, but there was nothing to be done about the goofy Pippi Longstocking braids. I did try to work into the conversations a couple of times that the dress was designer. “You know, Betsy Johnson. She did all the clothes for Sex and the City.” (They’re crazy for Sex and the City here.) But I just got blank looks and the occasional “Umm hmmm. Sure…”

So I made a beeline for the big pot of quentão – the hot mulled cachaça, that famous liquor of caipirinhas – and filled up a big ol’ country mug of it.

I wouldn’t let C take any pictures other than the bonfire. I was too embarrassed. So as payback, I’ll share one of him as a kid at a Festa Junina. He always was the ladies’ man.

2007 et cetera

Well aaawwwwlll-righty then. The blog. Truly, I wish I hadn’t stopped posting, but there were reasons. Real ones. And some I’ve made up along the way. It was never my intention to stop. It just kind of happened. Actually, a lot kind of happened in this last year and at the same time nothing really happened. I find myself more or less staring down the same dilemmas as far as life and career and choices that I was a year ago. Regardless, I liked blogging here and it is my wish and hope I will keep posting, but I know, promises, promises – so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

So I was doing my usual procrastinating last night and came on this “blog of note” on blogger. I’m not a big blog reader generally. (Maybe that is why I had terrible follow-through with my own.) But this one is stellar – and in some ways reminded me a little of my own experience, or at least my reasons for starting a blog in the first place - seeing the beauty and appreciating the strangeness of a place far from the context of your upbringing – and it’s written from Montana, not too far from Wyoming, where my heart still goes home to roost in dreams. Anyway, it got me thinking about trying to get back to posting with some regularity on mine. Let’s see what happens. Like I said let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First I should try to do a quick re-cap and fill you in a little on where I’ve been for the last year. It really shouldn’t be that hard because other than the noisy place in my head, it has been rather like the famous one-note samba.

But first, the speed dating version of some of the highlights.

We spent Carnival in Rio – now don't go getting all excited and start booking tickets to come down thinking we'll do this next year -- it was a lot of fun but in that exaggerated sort of way that makes it something you only want to do once. Sorry.


In May C and I drove down to the Enchanted Mountain retreat center south of Florionopolis. We stopped at the amazing city of Curitiba along the way (that's Niemeyer's "Eye".)


He was hired to film a promotional video which I assisted with (sort of).


And I taught a little at their annual Yoga Mandala which is a big 4 day conference with lots of teachers from all over the world. We hung out with Mukesh Desai (amazing, wonderful)...


And got a good photo-op with Dharma Mittra (and discovered the secret behind this photo)...


From there I flew straight back to New York where despite having caught a terrible chest cold I had an amazing ten days with friends, and where my 34th birthday was celebrated with an unforgettable afternoon getting scrubbed at a Korean Spa in New Jersey and a taco garden party at DZ’s in Red Hook.

Then it was on to California to celebrate my mom’s 60th birthday

and soak up the good life of wine tastings and fancy food

I may be a left wing crunchy barefoot yogi with brazillan sand in my starry Obama worshiping eyes, but I still look damn good in a Mercedes….


Arriving back in Brazil at the beginning of June the rest of the year went like this (all together now)
WOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!

I guess what happened was at some point I got (what my Brazilian friends call) "the American Ambitions" in my bonnet, and convinced Shakti, the yoga school where I teach, that they should think big, and not just plan a teacher training program but make it a 500 hour complete Aliança do Yoga registered program, and along with that schedule in advance a year long calendar of special events and monthly workshops, flying in guest teachers from around the country. I don’t know why, but they listened. And worse, none of us had any idea what we were doing.

So starting in June we flew by the seat of our pants into the eye of a yoga tornado which spun us around Gravitron style (remember those?) for the next 7 months, and in whose whirling incense-filled funnel could occasionally be spotted random body parts in various states of yogic contortion, along with torn out pages from Sanskrit dictionaries, the Upanishads, the Yoga Sutras and a photo or two of Amma and Bhaktivedanta which fluttered down like leaves in the wake of this Aquarian monster and above the din of which could be heard Krishna Das and his harmonium carrying on like a street corner preacher, underscored by a constant moaning that sounded somewhat like OM.


We stumbled out of the dust in December, dizzied, disoriented and surprisingly not in Oz, but rather right back where we started (oh Auntie Em) having made a little money on the teacher training but only barely breaking even on the rest of the events we threw so much time and effort at. See that’s the thing with yoga. You just can’t make money off of it. Don’t even try. The gods will just laugh at you and throw you right back into the storm and watch as you once again start flailing about, clicking your heels and crying out for home.

In the middle of it all I actually did slip out and take a little side trip into my own personal yoga melee, returning to the Enchanted Mountain in October to teach for 15 days for their 200 hour Teacher Training. It was my fourth time teaching for the program, but the first time I was on my own, not an assistant, not the lackey, but the numero uno teacher for physical, posture (asana) part. I was literally a lamb thrown to the lions. 50 of them.

All looking at me expectantly and licking their chops waiting for me to say something stupid. Which I did. With frequency. (More on that in a future post about the myriad of ways you can really embarrass yourself to the point of being pornographic while learning to speak another language.)


It ended up being a great experience, but totally nerve racking and exhausting. I had never taught 50 people before, let alone in another language, let alone persuading people in said language that I am an authority on a something which, let’s face it, even on my best days I am still a complete neophyte fool.


The hardest part of this past year – other than working every weekend, having no game plan, not knowing what we were doing, and not being able to see more than 24 hours in front of ourselves – all the writing that all of this entailed -- yoga writing, which I have to say, is really not my favorite thing to do -- at least not about asanas. My eyes just kind of glaze over. I'd rather do it, not write about it, especially when there are so many other things I'm dying to write about. Anyway, there are few good books in Portuguese on yoga, so we were responsible for creating a manual for our students. This meant every week researching and writing up pages on what we were teaching. For me this meant doing it twice, once in English, and then agonizing task of translating it into Portuguese.

In addition to all this I was also contracted to write part of a book on yoga postures for Joseph at the Enchanted Mountain – the original idea was that it would be written in English and later translated (by a presumably qualified translator) into Portuguese for publication here in Brazil. Somehow through the course of the year he decided the book should be published in Brazil first and I, after my mere two years here, and was capable of completing my part in Portuguese with a little help from whoever I can beg plead and cry to for time and patience. To date the only part that could be somewhat considered applicable for this project, is the hastily and poorly written 30 some-odd pages that were written while I was there in October.

So as you can imagine, all of this left very little time or mental capacity for blogging. So please forgive.

At any rate, this is the excuse for the absence, and the sum total of 2007. A year of yoga madness. That proverbial carrot that you find yourself trotting after even though it’s gone a bit rubbery and you forgot why you were following it in the first place.

I’ll try to fill you in at some point on my whole yoga teaching dilemma. It really has become a bit of an untenable beast.

But for now, I’d like to try to return to the point of this all. Brazil. And it’s strangeness and wonderfulness. Oh there is plenty to write about. My mom just visited for a few weeks and she got a full dose. A lot of the beauty and more than a few of the problems. When I tell my Brazilian friends about her visit they slap their foreheads saying, with an embarrassed finality, surely she will never come back. But that along with hopefully much more, I will save for another time.

TODAY - and everything in between (almost)

Okay, so I want to move on and forward. I am too lazy to cull through the old emails, and honestly, I don’t have much interest in reading about it, so I can’t imagine who else would. Besides, I’m ready to move on and write about what this was really intended for – my day to day observations and experiences about living here in Brazil. But just for the sake of being somewhat thorough, I’ll try to re-cap of what has happened since October and Carnegie Hall. Can’t promise it will be either interesting or short, but I’ll try.

First off, it was great to go back to New York in October as it kept the looming specter of homesickness somewhat off balance. But it was also a little hard. C rehearsed 12 hours a day and stayed mostly uptown in the Bronx. I lived off E’s couch in Brooklyn which was great. She gave me a home base from which to run around and catch up with people and take a lot of yoga classes – the awesome Jasmine and Dana at Laughing Lotus gave me a vip pass for the time I was there – and seeing as how tight money was, it seemed the very best option for spending my time. Practicing yoga and not spending money. I guess it was hard in the sense that it rained a lot, C and I didn’t have cell phones – imagine! – and it was just weird being only a little bit gone from NYC, but not entirely a stranger. It felt familiar and un-rooted, like home but homeless. Friends were going on about their lives and business and there I was rattling around for attention, a tourist, but not really. I listened to a lot of Brazilian music on my ipod (the Apple store actually replaced the one I broke in Brazil with a brand new one, one very wet rainy day – wonders never cease!) and was actually a little homesick for some Portuguese. It was really really great to see my mom and hubby F who came into town for a little business, but mostly for me.

(For all of my dearest friends who I didn’t see while I was there, I apologize. If you remember, it rained almost non-stop last October, which seriously impeded my getting around. Being broke I spent a good bit of time with a friend in Connecticut and stayed close to E's couch, till mom got here, then I freeloaded off her. I promise next visit back I'll be in touch with all!)

C and I got back at the end October and I spent a couple of weeks readjusting. Our apartment renovations finally wrapped up with the installation of cabinets in our kitchen and bathrooms. Not without a hitch though. The day of the kitchen cabinet installations, the workers didn’t read the apartment schematic correctly and drilled right into the water main pipe above the shut off valve.. The kitchen got flooded before we could figure out how to shut the water off for the whole building. Our neighbors loved us… A plumber was called but all the cabinets had to be uninstalled and left to dry before being rehung. A pain, but what can I say – in the end it’s the most beautiful kitchen I’ve ever had. I unpacked all my dishes and kitchen stuff, had plenty of room for everything and still have cabinets left over!

Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday here so that came and went sadly un-noticed. Well not quite. I had loosely planned to host our first dinner party the weekend before thanksgiving, but a bunch of people cancelled at the last minute and I moved the party to the following Friday, the day after thanksgiving. So it felt like a substitute. Indian food is barely known here as there are virtually no Indian immigrants. I had brought a bunch of Indian spices and food stuff back from New York, so I cooked a big dinner with chutneys and curries. We didn’t have any furniture in our living/dining area (still don’t as of writing this) so everyone sat on the floor on an old tapestry. I lit a bunch of candles and played some Indian ragas and made it a very themed event. It went over mostly well, except that I forgot to add salt to the basmati rice and it tasted bland, especially for Brazilians where lack of salt in food is a serious culinary violation. I think they have more salt in their blood than there is in the sea.

Christmas was nothing special -- I kept it that way so I wouldn't get too homesick. Spent Christmas Eve with friends Paulo and Monica at her “sitio” which basically is a term for a small peace of land in the country, usually 2 – 10 acres, that city folk use as weekend get away houses. Bigger pieces of land are called “fazendas” or farms but people also use them for weekend country homes. Christmas day I made pancakes and C and I exchanged presents. I told him that because neither of us were yet making money, and I didn’t know my way around very well that I would like us to make presents for each other. So I wrote him a song. Just lyrics, not music as I have zero talent in that department. It was fun and inspiring to write. I hope to do more. He gave me a skirt and top which I have only worn once, on Christmas, recalling for those of you who might remember, the fiasco over the “stupid hat” present I gave to him some years back – he ran out of time to make anything apparently. But I like it, as his taste is generally (not specifically) good.

We held New Years Eve on our terrace. I poured over old Gourmet and Bon App’s and Epicurious.com to find hors d’oeuvres recipes and made a bunch of good stuff. Couldn’t have been a more beautiful starlit night. We showed films on our big white wall and everyone ate and drank way too much. New Years day we continued the party at Max's sito with a pool side bbq. Brazilians are very serious when it comes to grilling meat as anyone who's ever been to a Brazilain "churrasqueira" restaurant knows -- it's meat meat and more meat. I brought eggplant and zuchinni to grill and people actually thought I was joking. Here's C's mom and me looking a little tired after cleaning up from the previous night's festivities.



C’s mom was here visiting for most of the month of January. It was really great to have her here. I think she is a lama or Buddha reincarnated. I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone like her. She’s calm, kind, positive and always in a good mood. I’ve never seen her get angry or excited or complain about anything. She’s gentle and sweet and everyone loves to be near her. I feel like a big warty mean ogre around her most of the time. This was especially made true during her last visit as C and I had a blow out fight one night in our room and in his anger at me stormed upstairs into her room and vented. Blessedly she really is a little Buddha and didn’t judge me at all. I think she realized that her normally peaceful son was just spouting off in frustration. She left for a week to visit her older son who lives in São Paulo and had just adopted a baby boy, and when she returned it was like nothing had ever happened. I of course stressed about her return the whole week and cried and brow beat myself and C for the fight, but it was of course completely unnecessary angst. I really hope we can spend more time with her during our time here in Brazil and that I can learn from her. I can probably learn more from this simple little woman that from many illustrious yogi’s.

The last week in January was probably the best week yet here in Brazil. We went for 10 days to a 300 year old city about 2 hours from us for a film festival. However, this post is getting way too long and probably boring. So more on Tiradentes later.

Almost dusted off

At last I'm on week 2 of the final promised land of Brazil peace and quiet and recuperation from crazy new york double yoga studio manager life. We finally moved into our apartment around the second week of August, and for another month proceeded to live with the construction work. We were so desperate to sleep in our own bed and get off the floor at Max's (the bugs in the country were starting to make us crazy) that we didn't even consider much less anticipate what a pain in the ass it was going to be to live in a torn up apartment with all the construction dust.

We did crazy renovations on our apartment and all of our stuff finally arrived out of hawk from the port in the midst of this (a lost of wheeling and dealing and under-table payments finally procured it), and amazingly, everything arrived from the container in one piece, nothing broken!


It truly is amazing, because as you can see from this picture, some highly unskilled workers at the port schlepped, no, threw, all of our stuff out of the container so that a custom's official could inspect it to make sure we weren't drug smugglers or something. But after C waited around all day with our stuff baking in the sun (thank god no rain) the custom's officer never showed up and they schlepped, no, volleyed, it all back into the container. Still can't believe nothing broke.

BUT I have since managed to break quiet a number of things (including my new ipod -- can't even write it without getting nauseous) as I shuffled them around from room to room in a desperate but failed attempt to keep one step ahead of the construction dust.

Anyway, they wrapped up the renovations just last week, and I was finally able to start unpacking! A mere, 4 months, after I finished sealing up the last box! Here's some before and after pictures of the renovations so you can see just what madness there was to this whole thing.


Can't say I've really delved into Brazilian life here. And just when things are starting to resemble something of a normal pattern, we're coming back for almost a month.

So I've been lazy about working on Portuguese, (and C is no help here, mr. 17 years in the states english speaker) -- but I'm my own worst enemy...when the internet is working well, I've been listening to NPR.... which actually started out in the good conscious that I was desperate to be informed as to what the hell was going on there in the wake of the hurricane -- the last one, not the upcoming one. What a heartbreaking infuriating mess.

I've been practicing yoga and noticing how much my practice changes when I'm not doing it around a teaching schedule. So much of it for me in the past was geared towards discovering things in the practice so that I could teach them. Now it's becoming more about discovering them just for the sake of discovery. And my practice is a lot slower and gentler. I've kind of lost interested in getting to the hardest poses. It's also a lot harder to keep focused when you have nothing but your own noisy head to contend with!

I've been getting a chance to catch up on reading (I just finished a Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving today. Have you ever read it? One of the first good reads I've had in a while that made me literally laugh out loud and sob like a baby.) Yes, I know, I should be reading in Portuguese, and not English newspapers or books, but... well, I just hate making it seem like a SHOULD, like I should take my medicine.. and not a natural desire...

But I am definitely planning on getting a teacher when we get back. We'll be getting into New York on Oct. 4th and staying until after the concert on the 23rd. Not sure what date we'll fly out on exactly, but given how expensive it's going to be for us to be in New York, it will probably be pretty shortly after. Can’t wait to see everyone!

Tick bites and too much pot roast

I so much want to sit and write something clever about my life here, but while there are many interested observations trickling through my brain, my computer time is never much relaxed.

Mostly we are just a little frustrated and stressed that we can´t get our container out of hock. A real trial by fire of learning to deal with the corruption and bureaucracy here... C is dying to get some instruments to practice on and I am dying to move into our apartment where I can start cooking and taking care of myself. Max was single for so many years after his divorce, he never used his kitchen. It has measly offerings for cooking -- everything is a improvisation, and I can´t remember a time when I´ve eaten so unhealthy for such a long period of time. We we do get good home cooked meals, (at C´s aunt or Max´s mom´s) and because you most certainly don´t want to refuse anything put in front of you, those home cooked meals have consisted of too much meat...

Anyway, that´s the bad part. The good part is Max´s girlfriend Julliana is just wonderful. She has been such an amazing friend it really has helped ease the sadness of leaving all my other girl buddies. Her best friend moved away to Manus (way up north near at the mouth of the Amazon) last year, right about the time her and Max got really serious, so I think she´s been lacking for female company and is glad to have me around. She´s a super smarty pants too, working on her masters in social psychology, and currently reading Foucault (in french). Max and C are kind enough to let us sleep-in in the mornings (they leave by 7:30am) so we spend time together in the house, mostly playing house (cooking cleaning) and walking around Max´s land -- there´s a big pond and horses, and amazing birds and monkeys. In the evenings and weekends, we all eat and usually drink too much beer and watch movies or make a big fire in the fireplace -- I taught them Exquisite Corpse the other night, but it wasn´t as much fun with so few people. And yesterday after several caipirihna´s they finally got me to play soccer with them -- three girls against the 2 boys (Julia, Max´s 16 year old daughter joined us, and she kicks ass at soccer -- could have taken the 2 guys on by herself... I mostly got in the way)

I think when we finally do move into our apartment we are all going to miss each other so much. I told them they would have to move in with us for a month or two and we would just keep switching back and forth.

Hmmm... other news? Got a bad tick bite... waiting and hoping no rash appears...

And my cutie puppy is getting bigger by the day. I can almost see her growing in front of me. She is just ridiculously cute... an incorrigible tailchaser (it goes on for hours) and a very fast learner. We mastered fetch in one day. Here's us by the fire on a "cold" night -- it was probably in the 40's.